Apple SWE Interview Experience [Summer 2025] One rejection One ghosted :(

Two Apple Interviews: One Rejection, One Ghosting :( 3 year Software engineer + 1 full year of interning sdet/full-stackish In progress MS in applied ai/ml I was contacted by two separate recruite

Two Apple Interviews: One Rejection, One Ghosting :( 3 year Software engineer + 1 full year of interning sdet/full-stackish In progress MS in applied ai/ml I was contacted by two separate recruiters for two different positions within a week of each other in mid-June. I had previously interviewed with Apple once before back in August of last year and totally froze during the technical screen when I got hit with a medium-ish heap-based coding problem. Since then, I’ve had several FANG interviews (

rejected every time) and have been prepping with dozens of Leetcode problems and a mock interview through interviewing.io (highly recommend). I religiously apply to any open position at Apple since they have a large office in San Diego, and I’d much rather stay here than relocate to the Bay Area. I’m currently sitting at 117 total Apple applications submitted for perspective. So yeah, I was obviously overjoyed to have two opportunities come up so close together. The two roles followed more or less the same pattern. The first started with a recruiter screening call, while the second began with an initial chat with the hiring manager that felt more like a casual meet and greet. (Definitely spend time polishing your personal introduction—it’s basically your sales pitch.) Round two for both was a 45-minute technical screen with an Apple engineer. I was expecting Leetcode-style questions but instead got OOP design problems in both. Neither was especially hard, but I’d strongly recommend planning your design carefully and making sure to cover edge cases and error handling for class methods. About a week later, I got invited to the panel interview for the first role. It consisted of six rounds meeting the whole team. Two were coding interviews: one was a surprisingly easy Leetcode-style problem solved with a frequency table; the other was another OOP design problem that I think went okay. My biggest regret was not spending more time in the pre-coding phase clarifying requirements. (I’d focused almost all my prep on Leetcode instead of design.) I got a rejection call a week later. The recruiter said I’d gotten positive feedback across all interviews and that both he and the managers wanted to find me another role to restart the process. We’ll see if that actually happens, will update if they follow through. The second role is the one that really stings. Two weeks after the technical screen, I got a message saying: *“Thanks for your patience. Positive feedback from the technical screen—we’ll be in contact to schedule the

next round sometime next week.” That was the last I ever heard. I sent three different follow-ups. Nothing. I’m extremely frustrated. Isn’t it literally 90% of a recruiter’s job to respond to emails? Why couldn’t they at least say “Role was filled internally,” “Lost funding,” “Team was reorganized”—anything would have been better than ghosting. I’ve been spending hours every day preparing for an interview that never happened. Mainly posting this in the hope that some* Apple recruiter sees it and realizes how cruel it is to do that to someone. >:(